Good Omens

“It’s Tchaikovsky’s ‘Another One Bites the Dust,’” said Crowley, closing his eyes as they went through Slough.

To while away the time as they crossed the sleeping Chilterns, they also listened to William Byrd’s “We Are the Champions” and Beethoven’s “I Want To Break Free.” Neither were as good as Vaughan Williams’s “Fat-Bottomed Girls.”

IT IS SAID THAT THE DEVIL HAS ALL THE BEST TUNES.

This is broadly true. But Heaven has the best choreographers.

THE OXFORDSHIRE plain stretched out to the west, with a scattering of lights to mark the slumbering villages where honest yeomen were settling down to sleep after a long day’s editorial direction, financial consulting, or software engineering.

Up here on the hill a few glowworms were lighting up.

The surveyor’s theodolite is one of the more direful symbols of the twentieth century. Set up anywhere in open countryside, it says: there will come Road Widening, yea, and two-thousand-home estates in keeping with the Essential Character of the Village. Executive Developments will be manifest.

But not even the most conscientious surveyor surveys at midnight, and yet here the thing was, tripod legs deep in the turf. Not many theodolites have a hazel twig strapped to the top, either, or crystal pendulums hanging from them and Celtic runes carved into the legs.

The soft breeze flapped the cloak of the slim figure who was adjusting the knobs of the thing. It was quite a heavy cloak, sensibly waterproof, with a warm lining.

Most books on witchcraft will tell you that witches work naked. This is because most books on witchcraft are written by men.

The young woman’s name was Anathema Device. She was not astonishingly beautiful. All her features, considered individually, were extremely pretty, but the entirety of her face gave the impression that it had been put together hurriedly from stock without reference to any plan. Probably the most suitable word is “attractive,” although people who knew what it meant and could spell it might add “vivacious,” although there is something very Fifties about “vivacious,” so perhaps they wouldn’t.

Young women should not go alone on dark nights, even in Oxfordshire. But any prowling maniac would have had more than his work cut out if he had accosted Anathema Device. She was a witch, after all. And precisely because she was a witch, and therefore sensible, she put little faith in protective amulets and spells; she saved it all for a foot-long bread knife which she kept in her belt.

She sighted through the glass and made another adjustment.

She muttered under her breath.

Surveyors often mutter under their breath. They mutter things like “Soon have a relief road through here faster than you can say Jack Robinson,” or “That’s three point five meters, give or take a gnat’s whisker.”

This was an entirely different kind of muttering.

“Darksome night / And shining Moon,” muttered Anathema, “East by South / By West by southwest … west-southwest … got you … ”

She picked up a folded Ordnance Survey map and held it in the torchlight. Then she produced a transparent ruler and a pencil and carefully drew a line across the map. It intersected another pencil line.

She smiled, not because anything was particularly amusing, but because a tricky job had been done well.

Then she collapsed the strange theodolite, strapped it onto the back of a sit-up-and-beg black bicycle leaning against the hedge, made sure The Book was in the basket, and wheeled everything out to the misty lane.

It was a very ancient bike, with a frame apparently made of drainpipes. It had been built long before the invention of the three-speed gear, and possibly only just after the invention of the wheel.

But it was nearly all downhill to the village. Hair streaming in the wind, cloak ballooning behind her like a sheet anchor, she let the two-wheeled juggernaut accelerate ponderously through the warm air. At least there wasn’t any traffic at this time of night.

THE BENTLEY’S ENGINE went pink, pink as it cooled. Crowley’s temper, on the other hand, was heating up.

“You said you saw it signposted,” he said.

“Well, we flashed by so quickly. Anyway, I thought you’d been here before.”

“Eleven years ago!”

Crowley hurled the map onto the back seat and started the engine again.

“Perhaps we should ask someone,” said Aziraphale.

“Oh, yes,” said Crowley. “We’ll stop and ask the first person we see walking along a—a track in the middle of the night, shall we?”

He jerked the car into gear and roared out into the beech-hung lane.